Gary Edwards, in talking about the new 2.0 release of Office, has this to say about market share:
For example, Microsoft claims that the Open Document doesn’t work with “the reality” of the installed base. But the fact is, you can run an Open Document application on Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Vista, and you could mix that computer with Apache servers, IBM servers, Plone severs, BEA servers, you name it, all seamlessly. ODF runs on 100% of the Microsoft monopoly base. You can’t say the same thing about MS XML.
And the really curious thing is Microsoft’s misrepresentation the nature of the install base in this area. If you look at the install base of Windows XP, it’s less than 40% of all the systems out there. Most impartial analysts think Windows XP is more like 15 to 20%. And here’s the really important point. Very, very few people are running Microsoft Office Professional 2003! Current estimates are that, given the requirements, about 8% of the market is able to run MS XML. That’s it. So yes, MS XML is very much a come on, a coercive vehicle adamantly encouraging Microsoft users to spend more money to get the collaborative computing functionality they can otherwise have for the price of a free download.
With OpenOffice.org closing in on 15% of Open Internet users combined on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, and Solaris, the OpenOffice.org install base is nearly double the Microsoft Office Professional 2003 install base. The ODF working base is 100% of the functional marketplace. Yet Microsoft is disingenuously talking to Massachusetts as if everyone is already running MS Office Professional 2003. And that’s not true.